Connected Franchise

Do you love Franchise mode or Superstar, but hate the fact that you can't brag to your friends about how freakin' awesome you are? Connected Franchise, renamed from Connected Careers, is right up your alley!

From the main menu, select Play from the menu bar, then Connected Franchise in the main menu panel. You can then select whether to start an online career or an offline, single-player career. Unlike last year, you can play offline careers multiplayer. That means co-op franchise is back!

If you choose to start a career online, you're given the option to start a league yourself or join an existing one. Leagues can be marked as private or public, and the commissioner (usually the league's founder) can force the weeks to advance if things seem to be going slowly. You can tweak the settings of an online league to your liking, even going so far as to make it private with a maximum of a single human player (you).

After choosing your online league, or selecting to run one offline, you're given the choice whether you want to Be a Coach, Be a Player, or Be an Owner. Check out those sections for more details on how to get started.

What Makes the Franchise "Connected"?

The overall goal in Connected Franchise is to play in the league as a player, coach, or owner, become skilled, win champions, and increase your personal Legacy Score to get you into the Hall of Fame. Franchises are connected because if you're playing online, you can compete with other human-controlled players to get to the Hall of Fame as well.

Even better, if you get bored of a character, you can just roll up a new one regardless of whether you're playing online or offline. Simple select the "Retire" option from the player options, and your current player or coach will retire... but you, as the human player, can just make a new character (not necessarily even at the same position) and just keep going with your personal NFL universe! Even online, you'll be given the choice whether you want to create a new character, or if you want to withdraw from the league entirely and open up the player spot.

Multiplayer Franchise

A change from last year is that offline Connected Franchises are now allowed to be multiplayer for the most part. This is a little strange to explain, so bear with us, and we'll provide examples.

There are basically two types of human players in Connected Franchise: call them the "main player," and the "support player(s)."

There can only be a maximum of 32 main players, and maximum one per NFL team. If you're playing Be a Coach or Be an Owner, the main player is the one who does roster moves, personnel decisions, relocation decisions, and so on. The main player can still simulate games if he doesn't actually want to play the game (and basically treat it as a text-based simulation).

You can create as many main players as you wish for a given save file, regardless of who owns it. For example, a single player can create 32 avatars if he wants to control an entire league by himself. He won't be able to control both sides of a given game, of course, but he could make trades with himself to ensure that they're accepted, for example. More practically, you and your friends can all create avatars to play Madden together, even if your friends don't have profiles on your console.

Main players' turns can be skipped any time and, if set in the league setup, the AI can make the decisions for that player. Players can therefore go on vacation, be unavailable, or whatever the reason, and everyone else can advance as needed.

Meanwhile, the support players are the ones who just want to play along, but don't want to deal with teams. They don't need to sign in to Xbox Live or PSN, and can help the main player in offline co-op games. Support players can also play against the main player, if you wish to play adversarial games, or if you want to put the fix in to help the main player.

Support players cannot play online, regardless of mode. There are no options for an online commissioner to enable co-op franchise.

Offline franchises are generally unrestricted. However, if the main player is playing Be a Player, the support player cannot play co-op. However, a support player can play adversarial. If the main player is Be a Coach or Be an Owner, then co-op is allowed, and support players can split among the main player(s) and AI teams as they wish.

Main players can be any mix of players, coaches, or owners per the league settings. Even though two main players cannot control the same team, one thing that makes your franchises connected is that you can play games against other players online based in your specific characters. For example, if you're playing as an MLB for the Pittsburgh Steelers while another human is playing as the coach for the Cincinnati Bengals, you two will face off twice during the season. The Bengals player will play the entire game as normal, but the Steelers player will only physically play the downs in which his MLB is actually a part of the play. It can make for some interesting dynamics, especially if one human is a QB and the other is a CB.

Limitations to Online Connected Franchises

As previously mentioned, human players cannot control the same team. This means even if you're a coach, you cannot trade for a main player who is acting as a Be a Player. However, you can trade for any other player, even on his team. For example, let's say a human user takes control of Tom Brady from the New England Patriots. As the coach or owner of a different team, you will be unable to trade for Tom Brady unless the human player quits the league. However, you could still trade for anyone else, such as Stevan Ridley or Rob Gronkowski.

This limitation also means any given league can only have a maximum of 32 human players (one for each team regardless of position). Also, you're sort of at the mercy of your opponent if you have conflicting positions. To cite a previous example, our human who is controlling the Steelers will have a lot of downtime, since he's not actually doing anything for half the game. Playing as a player for online Connected Franchise is an exercise of some patience, but it's a fun and rewarding system in case you're bored of the standard gameplay.

Finally, the more humans controlling the game, the slower the league may move. If everyone is committed to playing regularly, you can swiftly move the league along and continue your career. When any player is ready to play their game, their opponent (if not an AI) will get an instant message through the console to do so as well.

If someone is stalling and the commissioner doesn't want to force things, you might find yourself stuck waiting sometimes. Any matches you have against the AI can be done on your own time, but matches against human-controlled teams must be done live. You may want to coordinate with your opponent through Xbox Live or PSN messages to make sure your game happens.

The above all applies to online Connected Franchises, of course. You have much fewer limitations for offline connected careers, and can advance at your own pace. Just remember that unlike Madden 13, you can have cooperative games (or even adversarial games) in Franchise.